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In 1605, Henry Gardinn confessed to transforming into a wolf and then kidnapping, killing and eating a child with two accomplices. He was sentenced to death by burning at the stake by a Dutch court in Limburg; one of his co-conspirators ‘Jan le Loup’ was caught and executed a few years later. 1 Such incidents were comparatively rare and restricted to certain regions of Europe; although for contemporaries the horror of werewolfery laid not so much in the process of shape-shifting, but in the act of cannibalism. A few decades earlier, in January 1574, Gilles Garnier, a beggar from Lyons, had been burned to death at the stake after confessing to attacking, killing and eating several children as a wolf, although he admitted to strangling one boy in human form. 2 Testimonies of executed werewolves in sixteenth-century France and the Holy Roman Empire repeatedly referred to cannibalistic tendencies, particularly targeting children. 3 But an appetite for human flesh was not peculiar to early modern werewolves. Several centuries earlier, Gervase of Tilbury had compiled a miscellany of popular beliefs and folklore in his Otia Imperialia (completed by 1215), where he outlined a story of one Raimbaud de Pouget, a knight in the Auvergne, who became a fugitive when disinherited, wandered like a wild beast through the woods and, ‘deranged by extreme fear’, lost his mind and transformed into a wolf. In this form he attacked people, devouring the young and mangling the old. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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